The Green Corner is a learning environment for RCA students and staff which I started making in Spring 2025.

 

I developed this space for a number of reasons. Working in RCA Student Support, a department devoted to helping students through the emotional and practical challenges they may face during their University experience, fueled my ambition to create a space that sat outside the academic programme and took down emotional and physical barriers that prevent some students from creating. Secondly was a desire to simply improve the RCA environment. I have always found the Kensington campus to be an extremely ugly, inactive building for an art school. I really wanted to challenge this and try and improve our experience of the building as a creative vessel.

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The RCA did have a green space once - a conservatory, in the Darwin building which ran until the late 1980s. Hugh Carol's photographs in the RCA archive document a two tiered, enclosed green space, which was not only used by students during their studies, but as the work of MA Natural History Illustration students shows, was a home for birds, fish and insects.​ The decision to remove the conservatorary at the end of the 1980s, feels very strange, particularly now, as we face a climate crisis which has inevitably lead students and staff to address how art and design practice can help mitigate ecological destruction and improve environmental conditions. ​Creating a green space at the RCA that increased both biodiversity and green art and design practice therefore felt essential.

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My focus for the first stage of the project was to save as many of the plants on the Art Bar Terrace as possible. Many, if not all, had been completely neglected. It didn't take long for transformation to occur - the lemon tree for example went from grey and dry to green and lush with cuttting back and watering. Next, the balustade boxes which were also in a sad state. They also needed watering and cutting back. I kept anything that was still alive.

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Introducing new plants was next and integrating them with the existing planting. The Student Support team were very supportive, and didn't at any point make me feel like a fool or an imposition, growing plants in the Student Centre and welcoming donations of plants from uninterested owners. They even gave me a small budget to grow plants which were suitable for the terrace, seeing the activity of plant care and exchange as a benefit to mental health and wellbeing.